West 8, OMA, HR&A, BIG, Interboro, MIT, unabirdged, Sasaki, Scape, LOT-EK, WXY, PennDesign/OLIN, ARUP...
Superstorm Sandy forever changed the discussion about climate change adaptation and resilience in the United States. As the Sandy-affected region rebuilds, they have the opportunity to tap into the prolific pool of local ingenuity to strengthen their region and become more resilient to the current and expected impacts of climate change, sea level rise, and other environmental and infrastructural challenges through the process of design and collaboration.
The Teams
- Interboro Partners with the New Jersey Institute of Technology Infrastructure Planning Program; TU Delft; Project Projects; RFA Investments; IMG Rebel; Center for Urban Pedagogy; David Rusk; Apex; Deltares; Bosch Slabbers; H+N+S; and Palmbout Urban Landscapes.
This team combines the best of Dutch land-use planning, environmental and coastal engineering, and urban water management with the best of American participatory planning, community development, and economic analysis and financial engineering. The Dutch contingent consists of design professionals with extensive collaborative experience working to adaptively plan coastal regions around the world. They have envisioned, designed, and implemented some of the most important flood mitigation and management strategies worldwide. The American contingent, consisting of recognized professionals in the fields of architecture, urban design, urban planning, coastal engineering, community economic development, governance, education, graphic design, and financial-economic advising, have an extensive track record working with communities to find bold (yet sensitive) solutions to resiliency issues.
Interboro Partners have proposed to perform multidisciplinary, regional analyses of the region’s vulnerabilities in order to identify comprehensive flood-mitigation strategies aimed at making a more resilient region. The analysis will include work with low and medium-density, low-income, flood-prone communities to identify ways that these strategies could be tailored to help meet local needs. The team wishes to demonstrate that some of the pioneering flood-mitigation strategies developed by the team can be leveraged by vulnerable communities to strengthen local economies and improve housing, transportation, and public space on the municipal level.
- PennDesign/OLIN with PennPraxis, Buro Happold, HR&A Advisors, and E-Design Dynamics
The PennDesign/OLIN team combines the strength of PennDesign in cross-disciplinary research, design and communication, experience across the Northeast region, and institutional capacity to sustain long campaigns for change with a core team of high-capacity, strategic design practices: OLIN for landscape and urban design, and design and research integration, Happold Consulting for engineering of living regions and coastal infrastructure, HR&A Advisors for market and financing strategies, and E-Design Dynamics for hydrology and ecosystems. The core team, led by Marilyn Taylor, John Landis for research, and Ellen Neises and Lucinda Sanders for design, and Harris Steinberg for engagement, will draw heavily on an engaged group of advisors in architecture, planning, sciences, geographic information systems and climate modeling, and Wharton Business School, who will inform an approach on how best to shape alliances to layer buildings, living systems, social fabric, infrastructure and economies.
Climate resilience transformation for long, exposed coastlines with mixed density communities is a challenge that requires us to integrate design thinking, implementation and financing strategies, and it is also a matter of dialog, language formulation and thought leadership to achieve a dramatic cultural shift. Rebuilding Water Culture will create a common purpose that ignites action on the part of individual homeowners, businesses, developers, institutions, communities, and all levels of government for collective provision of infrastructure at every scale from the house lot to the region. The vision will combine technology and living systems—dunes, creeks, wetlands as well as the towns and cities of the shore—in a systemic infrastructure that is regional in scope, and attuned to both political ecosystems and the water dynamics of the coastal landscape. The team will integrate a range of tools to shape settlement patterns and mobilize sustained investment, including charismatic soft and hybrid protection landscapes, new formats of infrastructure-oriented development, risk communication, zoning, incentives and land management policy.
- WXY architecture + urban design / West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture with ARCADIS Engineering and the Stevens Institute of Technology, Rutgers University; Maxine Griffith; Parsons the New School for Design; Duke University; BJH Advisors; and Mary Edna Fraser.
In addition to WXY’s and West 8’s landscape architecture, urban design and planning knowledge, Arcadis brings engineering and hydrological experience of coastal infrastructure systems; Dr. Alan Blumberg of the Stevens Institute and Dr. Orrin Pilkey of Duke are academic experts in sea level rise and coastal zones with collaborating artist Mary Edna Fraser; Professor Kathleen John-Alder will provide support on landscape systems; Kei Hayashi is an economist specializing in financial governance issues; Maxine Griffith brings years of experience working in community development and at HUD along with Professor William Morrish of The New School’s expertise in urban settlements and infrastructure.
The WXY/West 8 team’s approach will take a multivalent look at the outermost conditions of the Northeastern American Coastline—its barrier islands, inlets, shorelines and riparian estuaries, and the way they overlap with the infrastructure and footprints of settlements from town to the largest cities. Our methodology will take a regional approach, investigating a series of prototypical transects that run from the shoreline to hinterland. A double agenda will drive the team’s process, whereby the team will create tangible strategies that can withstand the worst impacts of rising waters and storm surges while also asking how investment can catalyze social, economic and ecological health.
- Office of Metropolitan Architecture with Royal Haskoning DHV; Balmori Associaties; R/GA; and HR&A Advisors.
The OMA team marries expertise from both old and new Amsterdam. Led by architects and urban designers, OMA, the team brings together the water management and engineering expertise of Royal HaskoningDHV, the landscape and land-use planning experience of Balmori, the economic understanding of HR&A, and the communications and digital know-how of R/GA.
With a focus on high-density urban environments, the team’s driving principal is one of integration. The tools of defense should be seen as intrinsic to the urban environment, and serve as a scaffold to enable activity—much in the same way that the dam is the genesis of the city of Amsterdam. This will necessitate an approach that is both holistic and dynamic; one that acknowledges the complexity of systems at play; and one that works with, rather than against, the natural flow.
- HR&A Advisors with Cooper, Robertson, & Partners; Grimshaw; Langan Engineering; W Architecture; Hargreaves Associates; Alamo Architects; Urban Green Council; Ironstate Development; Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation; New City America.
HR&A Advisors has assembled a team of leading creative and technical experts who have decades of experience crafting strategies for overcoming the economic and infrastructure challenges that face our nation’s cities and towns. The team’s approach is both visionary and pragmatic, with much energy focused on ways to implement changes that are sustainable over the long-term. HR&A is joined by urban design and architecture firm Cooper, Robertson & Partners, and a team of innovative architects, engineers, and business leaders, for a multidisciplinary effort.
The HR&A Team will focus on resiliency measures for retail corridors, districts, and destinations, which are the lifeblood of communities, providing jobs, critical goods and services, and neighborhood gathering places. Retailers and their vulnerable basement-located inventory are particularly susceptible to storm impacts. In flood-prone communities, they often struggle to keep their doors open under normal conditions due to low densities and seasonal demand; the cost of new resiliency measures made manifest by Sandy is likely to make economic stability and growth even more challenging. The Team will look at design solutions for a variety of neighborhood and destination commercial districts, as well as newer waterfront retail destinations across the region in an integrated fashion. Equally, the team will focus on the critical policies and organizational resources needed to put recommendations into place.
- SCAPE with Parsons Brinckerhoff; SeARC Ecological Consulting; Ocean and Coastal Consultants; The New York Harbor School; Phil Orton/Stevens Institute; Paul Greenberg; LOT-EK; and MTWTF.
SCAPE has brought together an energetic, experienced design team that has been both at the forefront of innovative, speculative thinking on resiliency and a key public sector partner in re-building critical infrastructural systems. We have, together as a team and in separate initiatives, mapped, modeled, and studied in depth the Northeast region’s vulnerabilities and developed precise, innovative solutions that tie the regeneration of ecological and water networks directly to economic benefits, community development scenarios, coastal protection solutions, and public space enhancements. SCAPE has previously worked with every team member in initiatives that include the SIRR Report as the core coastal protection team (with PB) the Oyster-tecture project (which envisioned an active reef culture, offshore wave attenuation structures and water filtration) and the SIMS eco-pier in Gowanus Bay, among many others. Beyond infrastructure, our team, with marine biologists, fisherman, and oyster aquaculture experts, is focused on developing living systems, local ecologies, and recreational economies as added co-benefits to protecting our nation’s shores.
In SCAPE’s work both before and after Sandy, our design process has extended into and below the water, with a special focus on shallow water zones, which offer significant opportunities for establishing intertidal and sub-tidal marine ecologies, as well as forms of safer recreational interaction with potentially cleaner, slower harbor waters. Our team’s research has shown that elevated underwater reefs can break waves, reduce water velocity, bring down overall surge heights, and increase fisheries and marine biodiversity, making a difference for surrounding coastal communities. Oyster-tecture, our vision for protective living reefs in the NY harbor, integrates natural and infrastructural systems and ties ecological regeneration to coastal protection strategies, public space imperatives, and community-scaled actions. Habitat doesn’t have to end at the edge of a nature preserve or park – habitat, especially coastal & underwater habitat, has the potential to productively co-locate with urban and industrialized shorelines and waters. We will explore the potential for ecological infrastructure and the integrated territory between hard & soft, land & water, human-made & “natural,” habitat & infrastructure, and onshore & offshore interventions within the regional network of shallows and edges.
- MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism and the Dutch Delta Collective - ZUS; with De Urabisten; Delatres; 75B; and Volker Infra Design.
MIT + Dutch Delta Collective is an international team of designers and engineers, led by Alexander d’Hooghe / MIT and Kristian Koreman / ZUS. The team combines the cutting edge research and local knowledge of MIT and the best in water design and management from the Netherlands, such as De Urbanisten, Deltares, Volker Infra Design, ZUS and 75B. It also includes leading urban design practices, such as PREX, MY Studio, ORG, and Urban Risk Lab.
Crucial for resilient urban landscapes is the smart calibration of regional protection and local adaptation. The MIT-DDC team will execute design research on new strategies, instruments and typologies toward an inter-scalar proposal for a resilient Northeastern Seaboard.
- Sasaki Associates with Rutgers University and ARUP.
The Sasaki-led team, made up of designers, researchers, and engineers, is strategically positioned at the intersection of interdisciplinary design thinking. As a collaborative and energized group, the team has extensive experience working with public and professional stakeholders to affect process at a regional scale.
The team's conceptual design approach transcends municipal and political boundaries, facilitating a regional conversation about the rippling effects of rising tides and increasing storm surge. With a focus on the Coastal Communities of New Jersey's northern shore, the team will research regional vulnerabilities and implement local solutions; designing multi-functional scalable strategies at the intersection of ecological and economic reinvestment.
- Bjarke Ingels Group with One Architecture; Starr Whitehouse; James Lima Planning & Development; Green Shield Ecology; Buro Happold; AEA Consulting; and Project Projects.
The team’s approach is rooted in the two concepts of social infrastructure and hedonistic sustainability. By proactively cross-breeding public infrastructure with social programs, the team will inject new urban life forms into our cities. The team is committed to designing cities and buildings that are both ecologically and economically profitable–where sustainability is not a moral dilemma, but approached as a design challenge.
While the team’s ideas and proposals will relate to specific sites, they will focus on site scalability so that projects will be flexible. They will develop a toolkit for social infrastructure, a set of scalable solutions for the entire region. This toolkit will address two parallel goals: a safer, more resilient region and increased space for human enjoyment. The team proposes to study how this thinking could be translated into the region’s waterfronts, so that the infrastructure of climate-resilient waterfronts become the attractions—not detractions, upgrades—rather than downgrades.
- Unabridged Architecture with Mississippi State University; Waggoner and Ball Architects; Gulf Coast Community Design; and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.
Katrina created challenges for the team members from Mississippi and Louisiana, inspiring new expertise in armored structures, lines of defense, continuity of operations, strategies for water management, and engaging the community in ways that are intrinsic to design. Despite our intensive and personal experience in rebuilding over the last eight years, our concern is creating the capacity to adapt and focus on resilience against the next one.
Resiliency relies on buildings—secure, accessible, failsafe—to remain intact and operating, in places that are truly central to the community recovery, within the context of a dynamic landscape. In coastal communities these necessarily have multiple functions: first-responder facilities, housing, clinic, café, day care, library, and job training. Our concept for Hot Spots integrates shelter, self-sufficiency, education, mixed uses and coastal water systems into a single, project-scale prototype that is defiant in the face of rising sea levels; resistant to wind, temperature, and impact; and flexible enough to accommodate rapid changes to the program when emergencies occur.
